Family Pride eBook

“If I were her brother I would warn her that
her present career, though very delightful now, is
not one upon which she will look back with pleasure
when the excitement is over,” he said to himself;
“but if Wilford is satisfied it is not for me
to interfere. It is surely nothing to me what
Katy Cameron does,” he kept repeating to himself;
but as often as he said it there came up before him
a pale, anxious face, shaded with Helen Lennox’s
bands of hair, and Helen Lennox’s voice whispered
to him: “Save Katy, for my sake;”
and so next day, when Mark found himself alone with
Katy, while most of the guests were at the beach,
he questioned her of her life at Saratoga and Newport,
and gradually, as he talked, there crept into Katy’s
heart a suspicion that he was not altogether pleased
with her account, or with what he had seen of her
since his arrival.

For a moment Katy was indignant, but when he said
to her kindly: “Would Helen he pleased?”
her tears started at once, and she attempted an excuse
for her weak folly, accusing Sybil Grandon as the first
cause of the ambition for which she hated herself.

“She had been held up as my pattern,”
she said, half bitterly, and forgetting to whom she
was talking—­“she the one whom I was
to imitate; and when I found that if I would I could
go beyond her, I yielded to the temptation, and exulted
to see how far she was left behind. Besides that,”
she continued, “is it no gratification, think
you, to let Wilford’s proud mother and sister
see the poor country girl, whom ordinarily they would
despise, stand where they cannot come, and even dictate
to them if she chooses so to do? I know it is
wrong—­I know it is wicked—­but
I rather like the excitement, and so long as I am with
these people I shall never be any better. Mark
Ray, you don’t know what it is to be surrounded
by a set who care for nothing but fashion and display,
and how they may outdo each other. I hate New
York society. There is nothing there but husks.”

Katy’s tears had ceased, and on her white face
there was a new look of womanhood, as if in that outburst
she had changed, and would never again be just what
she was before.

“Say,” she continued, “do you like
New York society?”

“Not always—­not wholly,” Mark
answered; “and still you misjudge it greatly,
for all are not like the people you describe.
Your husband’s family represent one extreme,
while there are others equally high in the social
scale who do not make fashion the rule of their lives—­sensible,
cultivated, intellectual people, of whose acquaintance
one might be glad—­people whom I fancy your
Sister Helen would enjoy. I have only met her
twice, it is true, but my impression is that she would
not find New York utterly distasteful.”

Mark did not know why he had dragged Helen into that
conversation, unless it were that she seemed very
near to him as he talked with Katy, who replied:

“Yes, Helen finds some good in all. She
sees differently from what I do, and I wish so much
that she was here.”